Grey Cairns of Camster

In the third or fourth millennium BC, Neolithic farmers built both cairns on ground that was then dry and fertile, long before it turned to bog. Camster Round took shape as a compact circular tomb some 18 metres across, while Camster Long grew into a 60-metre horned cairn containing two burial chambers that may originally have been separate round cairns in their own right.

During the Bronze Age, centuries after the cairns were completed, peat began spreading across the surrounding moorland and eventually buried the once-productive farmland under the boggy ground that still surrounds the tombs today. The transformation left the cairns stranded in what now reads as a remote and inhospitable stretch of the Flow Country, far removed from the fertile landscape their builders had known.

In 1865 and 1866, antiquarians Joseph Anderson and Robert Shearer carried out the first archaeological investigations of the cairns, examining Camster Round in 1865 and Camster Long the following year as part of a wider survey of seven chambered tombs across Caithness. Their work opened the tombs to scientific record for the first time since their construction some four and a half thousand years earlier.

Between 1966 and 1968, P. R. Ritchie carried out limited conservation studies at the site, clearing some debris and preparing the ground for more substantial work to come. The investigation was modest in scope but set the stage for the large-scale excavation and restoration project that followed in the subsequent decade.

Large-scale excavation began in 1971 under John Corcoran, whose research was cut short by his illness and death during the project between 1971 and 1973, leaving his findings unpublished. The interrupted work meant that a full record of his excavation was lost to later researchers, even as the physical investigation of the cairns continued under new direction.

Lionel Masters took over the excavation and conservation programme between 1976 and 1980, completing the archaeological research that Corcoran had begun and carrying out the restoration work needed to stabilise the cairns. His findings on the Camster Long chambered cairn were eventually published in 1997 in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

The consolidation and restoration of both cairns was finally completed in 1981, and the site subsequently opened to the public under Historic Environment Scotland's care. Visitors can now crawl into the restored chambers much as the Neolithic dead were once carried into them, one of the few places in Scotland where that passage remains physically walkable.